STEP 4 Lessons

My first week taking over 8th grade!

In the first week, I established my rules, taught theme, lead whole-class discussions, and read chapters from The Good Earth out loud. 

The second full week teaching 8th grade.

In this week, I introduced characterization using the WALTER acronym. 

Students really enjoyed making posters to show off their favorite character from The Good Earth.

At this point in my experience I was copying most of my slides and lesson plan ideas from my mentor's slides from the year before. 

Starting to get into my own groove!

When I started the 7th short story unit at the beginning of March, I started to break away from using my mentor's old lessons and started creating my own. 

I created my own summative assignment, found a way to formatively assess their growth, and made my own lesson plans into slide shows!

Last week teaching 8th grade!

Before I handed the 8th graders back over to my mentor teacher, we finished off The Good Earth unit with a socratic seminar. It's hard to tell the amount of growth that I experienced just by looking at slideshows, but I was a completely different teacher during this week than I was in the first week.

By the end of my experience, I transformed into a teacher that has smooths transitions, gives directions clearly, speaks confidently, dabbles in off-task conversation, and knows how and when to redirect back to focus.